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It was tough to settle on just the one rant today but the general election had barely been announced before I spotted the first reminder on twitter about the Lib Dems broken tuition fee promise…

Yep, no arguments there. Broken promise. Bad. Still, Nick Clegg did actually apologise, which is something. And, to be fair, Labour had already let students down on tuition fees. Is that broken promise a good enough reason not to vote Lib Dems though?

I guess it’s hard to quantify or compare broken promises. (I’m not a student, although I have another reason for caring about tuition fees who is rapidly growing up.) Having said that, there seem to have been a few broken promises about lately. “We say: yes to the Single Market”, “Let’s give​ our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week”, “There should be no general election until 2020”, and so on.

If you’re unfortunate enough to follow me on twitter, you’ve probably noticed that I’m currently just a bit grumpy about the UK’s crazy course towards the worst possible exit from the EU.

To be clear, unless someone can convince me otherwise (I’m still waiting for a reply from my pro-brexit MP), I will be voting to remain in or rejoin the EU at every available opportunity. I’ll also be at the Unite for Europe march on the 25th March.

Even if, and this is clearly never going to happen, the current government suddenly do decide that they’ll give any of the supposed £350 million to the NHS, it kind of misses the bigger picture. That £350 million is already worth less than when it was plastered on the side of a bus and we haven’t even started to leave yet. Pointing out that the Conservative manifesto included a commitment to the single market would probably do more to help the NHS than complaining about a bus. Actually ensuring MPs get a meaningful role in shaping the UK’s future relationship with the EU might also be a good idea. There are plenty of issues that will impact the NHS at least as much as extra funding, all of which deserve more scrutiny than they are going to get as things stand. For example, the European Medicines Agency or staffing from the EU. I’ll stop before this turns into even more of a rant but the point is that Brexit could mean anything and it’s about time we started taking it seriously.
It’s not that I don’t have a problem with misleading busses. For some reason you can get away with saying whatever you like in a referendum, which needs to change if we’re going to persist in having them. I’d personally prefer never to have another referendum again but if we must have one, perhaps it could be on the NHS? Unless the government know the will of the people on that as well.

FACT: Adding ‘FACT:’ in front of anything you like doesn’t make it a fact!

Sadly there has been a distinct lack of facts from both sides of the debate. If I’m being charitable, that could be because the whole thing is a massive unknown. The substitute has not exactly been constructive though.

I know that the EU is far from perfect but unless I hear any compelling reason otherwise, I think I’ll be voting remain on Thursday. There are probably pros and cons for either choice but ultimately where you draw borders is so completely arbitrary that I’d personally prefer to live in a larger area that allows free movement of people, than a smaller one. I don’t want to live in a gated community for similar reasons!

Last week we finally escaped the minion for a day off. To make absolutely sure we couldn’t be followed, we left dry land and headed for No Mans Fort!

Somewhat surprisingly, I had a better 3G signal in the middle of the Solent than back at home! There was a good chance to see some of the history of the fort- there are still a few bits that haven’t been renovated, although I would definitely like to visit Horse Sand Fort one day.

We eventually got some lunch and, rather than follow the crowd to the tables in the middle, we found a sea view.

Not a bad spot for a nice cup of tea and a sit down at the end of the day either.

I’m currently camping on the living room floor while the last two rooms upstairs get a 60 minuteweek long several week makeover!

Since we moved in we’ve been using the en-suite as a cupboard, partly because the shower leaked. It did make a pretty good cupboard though so clearing everything out took a while. The rest of the house is now full to bursting, even with full loads to the charity shop and tip! Need less junk! After enough flights of stairs to qualify for a Redwood Forest, Ferris Wheel and Lighthouse badge, it was finally all empty…

This is the first major work we’ve done inside the house since having children so we planned carefully. Here are the blueprints at a 1:1 scale…

(No prizes for guessing who added the extra stickers.)

Partly thanks to an amazingly helpful local planning department, we had an extra window after day one. And no walls.

By the end of day two first fix plumbing is done, and the new and improved walls were beginning to take shape. (The existing walls upstairs are literally just a thin sandwich of plasterboard and paper. Quality.)

At the end of day three first fix electrics are in, the walls were back properly and the bonus window is looking like a fantastic idea.

The plastering started on day four and by the end of day six we have one less artex ceiling, fewer holes in the floor, the door back. Even the new shower tray fitted, which was a bit of a relief!

The whole job was meant to take five days but unsurprising it’s overrunning. It hasn’t helped that the floor under the old shower has rotted through. This time next week, it’ll all be done though, hopefully!

Granted the builds had/have problems, as most do, but for some reason the ‘solution’ always seems to be to move to the new shinny build technology of the week, without really focusing on what that’s meant to improve even at a technical level, yet alone from an end user/business perspective. You may as well be arguing about tabs vs 2/4 spaces.

It’s not up to me though, so here are a few early observations about Gulp:

It seems to have a few issues with error handling, although gulp-plumber has helped

More worryingly, Gulp appears to have a tendency to hang, which doesn’t seem ideal from an integration point of view

A lot of the examples I found did things ‘the wrong way’
(There’s a plugin blacklist and I’ve found a few strongish views on how not to do things in Gulp, just less concrete examples on what the right way is so far)

It’s not really any better or worse than Grunt, just different
(Not that I’ve spent that much time with Grunt)

Given there’s almost no chance of making everyone happy with the choice of build tools, I would just leave the decision to whoever creates a new project, hopefully taking in to account ease of development and continuous delivery, and then leave it alone.

If you really think you want to change from Grunt to Gulp, or between any other build technologies, don’t do it. No, really, it’s a waste of time. You’re thinking about trying Broccoli now aren’t you? Or Brunch? (Really, I’m not making these names up!) Why don’t you switch off your computer and go out and do something less pointless instead? If you really can’t stop yourself, at least buy everyone on the team lunch first.